The Good Audition Guides: Helping you select and perform the audition piece that is best suited to your performing skills Each Good Audition Guide contains a range of fresh monologues, all prefaced with a summary of the vital information you need to place the piece in context and to perform it to maximum effect in your own unique way. Each volume... more...

You may not recognise the phrase, but if you have ever picked up a paper you?ll have come across ‘journalese?. Essentially, it covers words and phrases that are only found in newspapers – whether tabloid or broadsheet. Without them, how would our intrepid journalists be able to describe a world in which late-night revellers go on booze-fuelled rampages,... more...

The first English-language translation of the memoirs of Hans Keilson, one of Europe?s most masterful and remarkable writers
In this unique work, which was composed in the 1990s and only recently rediscovered, Keilson brings back a bygone era in snapshots from a life spanning one hundred years. The external stations of this life ? his youth in... more...

When did cigarettes start making an appearance in English literature? Which author's heart was purportedly eaten by a cat? One of our best-known and best-loved literary critics turns his attention to the more bizarre areas of literature in this miscellany of fact and trivia. Which author had the heaviest brain? What was the original title of 1984... more...

Wouldn?t it be great to be a fly on the wall as the great writers took pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard)? While reading this work, you?ll be just that. Here are behind-the-book stories and facts about authors, publishing and everything literary that will entertain both casual and serious readers. Among the questions asked and answered: ?... more...

This corpus-based study of allusions in the British press shows the range of targets journalists allude to - from Shakespeare to TV soaps, from Jane Austen to Hillary Clinton, from hymns to nursery rhymes, proverbs and riddles. It analyzes the linguistic forms allusions take and demonstrates how allusions function meaningfully in discourse.... more...

First published in 1797, The Columbian Orator helped shape the American mind for the next half century, going through some 23 editions and totaling 200,000 copies in sales. The book was read by virtually every American schoolboy in the first half of the 19th century. As a slave youth, Frederick Douglass owned just one book, and read it frequently,... more...